This is a relatively quick and easy article to write. The first mobile phone call was made just over fifty years ago on April 3, 1973. The Internet is almost fifty-five years old. This is August 2023 in the 21st Century.
Bear in mind, the first transcontinental phone call, amplified by thermionic valves that made a coast to coast call in the USA possible, was made only 58 years ealier in 1915. Not even sixty years passed between phone calls that could barely be heard up to 1200km distance, to transcontinental distances, to intercontinental calls over Telstar satellites, to mobile phones. -- sidenote. Look up the provided links...
I'm sitting at a large older monitor plugged into a venerable and ancient laptop typing this on a wireless keyboard, with a bluetooth earpiece in my ear listening to music and podcasts via a Samsung mobile phone. We have subscriptions to several streaming services that we access on a smart TV running Android.
All these devices are the progeny of ENIAC which became one of the first general-purpose computers in 1945, but Herman Hollerith developed the first machine that tabulated by punched cards in the 1870s, and Vannemar Bush developed electric/electronic calculating machines in the 1930s.
The DEC PDP11 was a good machine for its day, and in 1994 I was lucky enough to get hold of one that was in a 4ft (old school measurements, yes) fully enclosed rack cabinet with a smoked glass door,and consisted of a CPU (in the Wikipedia image, the thing with the row of keyswitches near the bottom of the rack) in the middle, a few power control switches and an output panel at the top, and a high speed paper tape punch/reader for storing and loading programs into it just under the CPU. It was very impressive in my flat, taking up the space of two bar fridges on top of each other as it did. It was also plugged in and fully working, and I'd painstakingly cut a paper tape that sequentially lit the panel lights and clicked the power control relays occasionally. It also dimmed the lights momentarily when I turned it on, and an observant friend noticed that it made lights flicker ever so slightly in sync with the running program. Today, my mobile phone is several orders of magnitude more powerful and runs for several days on a li-ion battery. Needless to say, the PDP11 only got switched on when I had visitors I wanted to impress.. -- my braggy sidenote
The first 3D printing equipment - 1980s. Reprap ("I am your father, modern 3D Printers!") was a fairly recent 2005. Compare and contrast with a Bambulabs P1S which is pretty much the acme of home 3D printing and came along just under two years after its progenitor the X1 Carbon. (By the way, if anyone wanted to shout me a P1-P or P1S I wouldn't say no. Just sayin'...)
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| It just made me want to produce a graphic. All my graphics can be bought at full size and without text or URL tag, just contact me |
I'm also looking at a series of 3D-printed items - a caddy for holding several external disk drives, a few other tools and assistive things I printed for us. If I need a tool or have a problem - I can make what I need. We have lids to save partially used tins and tubs of tomato paste, the cats have dishes with raised ridges on the bottom to allow them to get their cat kibbles easily, and there are some "stuff organisers" in the bathroom mirror cabinet to keep about fifty small items - organised - and easy to find.
The future really IS all around us.
It'd be a pity if some kind of climate crisis spoiled all that future...
EDIT: I found a few more things that say "the-future-is-here" to me, loud and clear. First up is a "pin" (I guess a brooch style pin from context, because the picture included could be anything, really) made by ex-Apple employees that acts as a voice-activated AI assistant and, while it purports to sort of get out the way of life and be unobtrusive it seemingly needs you to hold up a hand to see a projected display, which I'd find weird if someone was facing me and suddenly held up a hand and started at their palm. Not sure if it can do audio too but then does it just blurt your answer out or do you need to still wear an earpiece?
Don't get me wrong - it's the sort of tech I'd kill for but I think it's a solution looking for a problem. I already have a mobile phone that does all of that, and people have become used to them in the fifty years that we've had them and the thirty-five years that they've become a mainstream device. If they could really make the tech get right out of the way I'd be on it like white on rice though...
Too soon to tell if this is the next killer device but fingers crossed.
Second thing is more geeky even than that first one - if that's possible, and I think you'll agree with me when you read this that it is. It's an optical network on a chip and it promises (to me, anyway, as I read the article) that pretty soon the capacity to run a massive AI program in a slot of your desktop PC. I just know that this Optical NoC will be shrunk and shrunk down and finally it'll reside on your probably quite large mobile phone - and when it is, it'll eat Humane's lunch.
And maybe *this* time I can hit enter on the article and let it stay scheduled...
EDIT: Nope - I had to edit again, this time to add the paragraph below the lede about telphone communications to give an idea of how fast the technology developed; and to add the sidenote about my PDP11 in my pokey little flat in the 1990s. (Sidenote to that sidenote: I also had four conventional tower case servers of some sort (that were tall enough to lay a large panel door across to form a big and handy workbench/workdesk) that had power supplies so hefty that I once used one of them to arc weld outside just to prove the point to a doubting friend when he asked why I didn't power all my old 'puters up together to have a really great display. Kenny, as I said back then there ain't no household fuse panel can supply that much juice without catching fire... Also, the tower servers were some weird brand I was only really keeping for the power supplies for other projects. - And the fact that they made for a very interesting workbench/desk unit... )
(Oh more - I also had a huge-ass ASR-33 style teletype, a carton of blank paper tape, and - for a while - the entire stage sound setup of a band with a head rack and effects rack I built for them out of their gear, a 24 channel front of house mixer desk, and the speaker stacks. And yes the tiny living/dining room also held a couch, TV, a decent stereo, and several computers like a VIC-20, C64, and am Amstrad CPC464 with disk drives, much of it interconnected so the stereo provided a bit more oomph for games and demos. To say my neighbours probably hated me at times might be an understatement... 😸 - - - I might throw together some memoirs sometime.)
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